Voice recognition products are more and more widely available which use various schemes for comparing features of input voice with either predetermined voice templates or voice templates determined by a training process. Thus, for example, speaker independent voice recognition products compare features of received voice with predetermined templates for words such as "1", "2", etc., or word parts commonly called "phonemes" or "triphones" in the art, which can be assembled to form templates for complete words. The advantage of a speech recognition system that is based on word parts is that new words can be constructed out of the parts of templates that already exist in memory. Thus, for example, the first part of the composite template for "promise" can be combined with the last part of the template for "conduct" to form a template for the word "product". Also, voice activated word processing software is available in which a large number of composite templates are used to recognize speech input from a microphone and to display the spoken words in a word processing application.
Products such as these focus on recognizing a word, where the input word is unknown, but is one of a limited selection of words from a dictionary, or they focus on training such a recognizer by preselecting a word which a user is to speak and creating a template or model in memory for that word when the speaker speaks the word. Voice recognition devices of the types described presuppose that the speaker is reasonably able to speak the language to be recognized.
A preferred embodiment of the present invention is described, by way of example only, with reference to the drawings.